Friday, April 20, 2012

Innovation: Have We Reached The End of the Internet Age?

After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups.

We're there. The future that visionaries imagined in the late 1990s of
phones in our pockets and high-speed Internet in the air: Well, we're living in it.

"The third generation of data and voice communications -- the
convergence of mobile phones and the Internet, high-speed wireless data
access,
intelligent networks, and pervasive computing -- will shape how
we work, shop, pay bills, flirt, keep appointments, conduct wars, keep
up with our
children, and write poetry in the next century."

That's Steve Silberman reporting for Wired in 1999,
which was 13 years ago, if you're keeping count. He was right, and his
prediction proved correct before this century even reached its teens.
Indeed, half of tech media is devoted to precisely how these devices and
their always-on connectivity let us do new things, help us forget old
things, and otherwise provide humans with as much change as we
can handle.

I can take a photo of a check and deposit it in my
bank account, then turn around and find a new book through a Twitter
link and buy it, all while being surveilled by a drone in Afghanistan
and keeping track of how many steps I've walked.

The question is, as it has always been: now what?

Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet." Fifteen years
ago, it was, "Build the Web." Five years ago, the answers were
probably, "Build the social network" or "Build the mobile web." And it
was in around that time in 2007 that Facebook emerged as the social
networking leader, Twitter got known at SXSW,
and we saw the release of the first Kindle and the first iPhone. There
are a lot of new phones that look like the
iPhone, plenty of e-readers that look like the Kindle, and
countless social networks that look like Facebook and Twitter. In other
words, we can cross that task off the list. It happened.

What
we've seen since have been evolutionary improvements on the patterns
established five years ago. The platforms that
have seemed hot in the last couple of years -- Tumblr,
Instagram, Pinterest -- add a bit of design or mobile intelligence to
the established ways of
thinking. The most exciting thing to come along in the consumer
space between then and now is the iPad. But despite its glorious screen
and extended battery life, it really is a scaled up iPhone that offers
developers more space and speed to do roughly the same things they were
doing before. The top apps for the iPad look startlingly similar the top
apps for the iPhone: casual games, social networking, light
productivity software.

For at least five years, we've been working with the same
operating logic in the consumer technology game....MORE